The White Widow: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

back to work. The company was willing to make exceptions to its weight rules to get drivers during the war but not afterward. Mr. Glisan, the district superintendent in Houston, told him straight: “Slim down or it’s back down to transit, Jack.” Nobody said anything like that to Loretta at the
Corpus Christi Caller
classified advertising department, so she did nothing serious about her weight problem. As she said more than once to Jack, “If God had wanted me to be tall and skinny, that’s what I’d be.” It was only a few times more than once that she said it because after Jack got way down they no longer talked about it, continuing to act like they were still the overweight lovers they had begun as.
    “On Time Jack Oliver returns again,” she said, reaching for him.
    “On Time Jack Oliver always returns again,” he said.
    It was one of their standard greetings, one of what they called their love jokes.
    They threw their arms around each other and kissed hard on the mouth. It was what they always did when he came in after a night away in Houston.
    Jack patted her on her rear end and they moved toward the kitchen together. His eye fell to her legs. There was no bump on either one of them.

    He very much wanted to make love. He was used to having that feeling when he returned from an overnight run. It went with being a bus driver. It went with captaining a speeding motor coach full of precious human cargo down the highways and through the cities and towns of America. That was the line a lot of the drivers used, at least. One of them, a guy who drove Houston–Dallas, said it was a scientific thing. His wife, who was an operating-room nurse, said rodeo riders,jockeys, bicycle racers, tractor operators and other men who had their private parts rubbing up against something for long periods of time all had the same sensation and need when their day’s work was done.
    The terrible part of Jack’s feeling tonight was that he could not imagine having sex with Loretta, the only woman he had had it with, not only since they married but in his whole life. She was the first and the only, except in his mind, where he had been very active since junior high school. The only real activity besides Loretta had been some necking with secretaries from the traffic or operating departments a few times after company safety parties in Houston. It had always made Jack feel bad and guilty and ashamed when he remembered what he had done, and he always vowed that it would never ever happen again.
    But that made him very, very unlike so many of the men he drove with. “What would you think about your wife doing what you’re doing?” he once asked Ray “Smooth” Jefferson, a Houston–San Antonio driver who was notorious for poking any woman who would let him. “I’d kill her,” said Smooth.
    There was that additional truth about Jack’s not fooling around. Before he put on the uniform of a Great Western driver and began to trim down his weight, there were few opportunities, few women who made themselves available to him. None, to be even more exact about it. He had grown up pudgy in Beeville, a small town north of Corpus on the San Antonio highway, U.S. 181. And he had stayed pudgy through high school, his year of junior college at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi and into a career driving buses. He had also had a serious pimple problem from the fifth grade on, and it all combined to prevent him from ever having a real date with a girl until he was twenty-two, when he met Loretta’s cousin Alice Armstrong, who everybody called the All-American Girl!, after the radio show about Jack Armstrong,the All-American Boy. Alice was a revenue clerk at Nueces Transportation Company. One afternoon a week before Christmas, as he was turning in his report and the change from his fare box, she asked Jack if he was “booked” for that coming Saturday night. He sure wasn’t, he said. She said a bunch of the girls there in the office were going